‘Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome’ Not Moving Forward As TV Series On Syfy, May Become Digital Series

By NELLIE ANDREEVA | Wednesday March 21, 2012 @ 3:40pm

It’s a case of bad news/good news for Battlestar Galactica fans who have been flocking to the Web to watch an unauthorized trailer for the long-in-the-works offshoot Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome over the past 36 hours. After lengthy deliberations, Syfy has decided not to go forward with the project, about the young years of William Adama, as a regular TV series. Blood & Chrome, initially envisioned as a Web series, was greenlighted as a two-hour TV pilot in October 2010. Because of intensive post-production, including special effects, the pilot was not delivered to Syfy until last November. As of January, Syfy president original programming Mark Stern was quoted as saying that he the network brass were “trying to figure out the economics right now” and that he hoped those would be figured out. Now, the network has passed on the project as a regular series but is looking to do it as a digital one, while airing the already produced pilot on the network as a movie. “Though the vision for “Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome” has evolved over the course of the past year, our enthusiasm for this ambitious project has not waned,” Stern said in a statement today. “We are actively pursuing it as was originally intended: a groundbreaking digital series that will launch to audiences beyond the scope of a television screen. The 90-minute pilot movie will air on Syfy in its entirety at a future date.”

Despite the lengthy production and decision-making, the buzz about Blood & Chrome never died among Battlestar fans. It went into overdrive over the past couple of days following a WonderCom panel over the weekend with Kevin Grazier, the scientific adviser for Syfy’s Battlestar Galactica series, where he screened what was described as a trailer for Blood & Chrome. That trailer, to Trent Reznor and Karen O’s cover of “Immigrant Song” for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, found its way to the Web on Monday night and has gone viral — garnering some 100,000 views in 24 hours. The problem was that this was not an official trailer but a demo reel not intended for public consumption and thus not put through the process of clearing music and other rights. It is still unclear how the video made its way to WonderCon, but NBCUniversal today moved swiftly to take down the multiple copies that had popped up on YouTube. Universal Cable Prods, which produces Blood & Chrome, may still shop the project to other networks. Michael Taylor wrote the teleplay from a story by Battlestar Galactica executive producer David Eick, Taylor and Bradley Thompson & David Weddle.

I'm curious which networks they would be shopping the series to. I sincerely hope that no network bites and they finally let the BSG franchise rest in peace. I really don't want to sit around and wonder week by week if this series can be pulled off. Good move by Skiffy.

I'm curious which networks they would be shopping the series to. I sincerely hope that no network bites and they finally let the BSG franchise rest in peace. I really don't want to sit around and wonder week by week if this series can be pulled off. Good move by Skiffy.

I doubt they'd shop it around much; it kind of has a 'made-in-Skiffy' smell to it....

His imdb page listed it in development for awhile, now it's gone. Again! Bryan Singer/imdb

I know imdb is not really reliable, but neither is Singer's track record with BSG. He had one attempt before in 1998 (with Glen Larson), and it fell through. Another in 2001 (this one actually got to the set-construction stage); that one also folded supposedly because of 9/11 (!). Kind of ironic, since Ron Moore's BSG so elegantly used post-9/11 angst and sentiment into his new BSG formula; NuBSG was kind of cathartic in a way.

I respect Singer's other works (Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, some of his X-Men movies and even Superman Returns), but I wish he'd quit flapping his gums every few years with this "I'm-making-a-BSG-movie" bulls**t. He's embarrassing himself by trying to pretend he has BSG fan cred....

From what I've read on blastr.com and a few other sites the project is still "around". John Orloff is currently writing the script. With that said Singer is off doing all kinds of other projects so it may take another 34 years to get off the ground.

From what I've read on blastr.com and a few other sites the project is still "around". John Orloff is currently writing the script. With that said Singer is off doing all kinds of other projects so it may take another 34 years to get off the ground.

Singer was the muscle that could've pushed it through, however. Without him? It's as good as dead; script or no script. And Singer obviously has 'better' things to do (frankly, I don't blame him; the idea of a BSG movie so soon after the conclusion of both BSG and Caprica is downright pointless).

I have an excellent book called "The Greatest SciFi Films Never Made" and it chronicles one after another of projects that reached script and preproduction stages but never got made. Alternate Star Trek/ALIEN movies, a scary alien movie from Steven Spielberg (about aliens terrorizing a farmhouse; it got ditched in favor of ET), Arthur Clarke's "Childhood's End", and many others that would've REALLY been amazing (some ideas were so good it HURTS).

I see Bryan Singer's various, fruitless BSG attempts making a future chapter of an updated edition someday.....

A must-read for any scifi movie geek who wants to know how the industry works!

Was it determined that skiffy isn't going to air this at all or are they doing a one off in 2013?

I haven't heard s**t about B&C for ages....

If you listen to Skiffy's b/s talk for it? You'd think it was a guaranteed series run. I doubt it; they've sat on this thing for what, almost two years now?
I'm sorry, but if was so damn great about this project? We'd have seen it already. Or at the very least a trailer that stays on the internet longer than 24 hours.
Personally? I think they made a dog with fleas, and now they are just looking for a vet to put it down...

But (as I always say) I'd LOVE to be wrong!! Please, SyFy... make me wrong.

I'm sorry, but the virtual sets have all the heft of a videogame. Which is VERY much what this production looks like to me; a big, glossy videogame.
Still not over-the-moon for this one yet.... however, considering all of the other crap they dump on SyFy? This may be the best thing they've shown in years.

Found the trailer again on Youtube; this time with more BSG-appropriate music (a tad less distracting). Enjoy!